[Techtalk] script for adding users

[Devdas Bhagat]

On 09/05/04 10:07 +1000, wendy wrote:
> Anybody know of an easy way to add 100 users to linux?  I was thinking
> in terms of maybe a bash script calling on a spreadsheet file with
> username and password. 
>From man 8 newusers
       newusers - update and create new users in batch

       newusers  reads a file of user name and cleartext password
       pairs and uses this  information  to  update  a  group  of
       existing  users  or  to create new users.  Each line is in
       the  same  format  as  the  standard  password  file  (see
       passwd(5)) with the following exceptions.

Alternatively, you could run a loop over your source file and call
useradd and then chpasswd to set passwords.

If the input is of the form
username:password
for i in `cut -f1 -d: input_file`
do
	useradd ${i}
done
chpasswd input_file

Devdas Bhagat